Unintended Consequences
Death with Interruptions, Jose’ Saramago, 2008
Grim Reaper 
“THE FOLLOWING DAY, NO ONE DIED.” thus begins Portuguese Nobel laureate Saramago’s newest novel. In this inventive work, each country in the world has its own angel of death or grim reaper and Portugal’s is female, bored, restless, and wants to experiment. Suddenly no one in Portugal is dying but the early euphoria soon turns to gloom as it is discovered that normal aging continues; the only difference is that those who used to die enter a seemingly permanent vegetative state. When is it discovered that a person so suspended is transported to the border, they die immediately after crossing into the next country. Neither families nor the state want the responsibility for carrying out this solution until the maphia offers to transport family members for a fee.
After a number of months of this, the angel of death decides she has made a mistake and writes a letter to the director of state television announcing the end of the experiment at midnight, but that she will henceforth notify by letter written on violet colored paper that the recipient is due to die in exactly one week. She says this notice should allow the recipient to get their affairs in order before dying. She signs the letter death. At midnight, 65,000 people die and the letters start arriving mysteriously in the mail and the recipients all die one week after receiving their letter.
The novel then turns to focus on death and her trusty sidekick, the scythe. She is described as a skeleton dressed in a white sheet. The unintended consequences of her letters of notification are compounding until one day a single letter gets returned to her. The rest of the novel deals with her efforts to deliver this one letter.
Very inventive and entertaining.